When It’s Time to Change

Changes are afoot for this old weblog, as you can see with the minimalist re-design (big thanks to Kris for helping out!). Scrubbles.net is not going away any time soon, but the redesign is part of a larger effort not to place so much of my online identity on a made-up word that I came up with on a whim in July 2000. This has been brewing for awhile, but probably the tipping point was regularly searching for “Scrubbles” in Twitter and finding out about all the stupid, illiterate, vulgar people who used that word. If anything, Scrubbles.net is not stupid, illiterate or vulgar — so essentially Matt Hinrichs will be diversifying himself from his origins.

Not to fear, however — I will definitely keep Scrubbles.net going with thoughtful, long-form posts at least once a week. The weekly Flick Clique is going away, but I will make sure to periodically post on films that catch my eye (don’t forget to check out my DVD Talk reviews!). Mostly I’d like to use this space to get back to exploring design, illustration, retro kitsch and other stuff in more detail than would be contained in yer average tumblr post. It’ll be loads of fun, and I already have a swell book (a birthday gift to myself) that will be shared here shortly.

Like I said, the redesign is just part of a bigger re-branding project for me. It includes:

My new Matt Hinrichs Design & Illustration portfolio page, now at Cargo Collective. This replaces the self-hosted, old-style HTML site that I’ve hand-coded since ’bout 1996. While it still needs to have a few pieces added, the site looks nice and professional.

A Tumblr page with its own domain – 4 Color Cowboy. This is where I’ll be posting short daily stuff – images, videos, songs, whatever. I’ve long had an aversion to sites like Tumblr that are so damn passive, but I suppose this is a sign that I’ve finally joined the Borg. Surprisingly, Tumblr is a fun, fun place and their interface (unlike WordPress) is a breeze to set up and use.

My Scrubbles Twitter profile has been rechristened 4 Color Cowboy with a new profile design. Exciting, and a little nerve-wracking since there’s the possibility that my current followers will get confused and un-follow me. Since Twitter is more readily identified with their users’ real names, however, I’m not too fearful of that.

My Flickr user name has also been re-branded to 4 Color Cowboy, although the URLs for all the images remain the same.